The board-room, the secretary's room, and the various apartments devoted to the resident officers on the ground-floor, are plain enough, however, though they are of good size and proportions, the only really ornamental article of furniture in the board-room being a handsome semi-grand piano, the gift of one of the committee. This is a real boon to such of the patients as can come to practise choral singing, as well as to those who can listen delightedly to the amateur concerts that are periodically performed, either in the hospital itself or in one of the wards. For they have cheerful entertainments in this resort of the feeble, where, to tell the truth, food is often the best physic, and sympathy and encouragement the most potent alleviations. As to the actual physic—the employment of medicines—it is only in some of the large endowed hospitals that {255} we can see such a dispensary as this spacious room, with its surrounding rows of bottles and drawers, its two open windows, one communicating with the men's and the other with the women's waiting room, its slabs, and scales and measures, on a central counter, where 380 prescriptions will have to be made up to-day before the alert and intelligent gentleman and his assistants who have the control of this department, will be able to replace the current stock out of the medical stores. These small cisterns, each with its tap, occupying so prominent a place on the counter, represent the staple medicine of the establishment, pure cod-liver oil, of which 1,200 gallons are used every year, and they are constantly replenished from three large cylinders, or vats, containing 800 gallons, which occupy a room of their own adjoining the dispensary and the compounding room, the latter being the place where drugs are prepared, and the great art of pill-making is practised on a remarkable scale.